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It was one of the best I have ever been to.
And in the middle of this orgy, that wasfantastic, somebody knocked on my door.
I said: Just a moment!
This is an orgy!
The utter ecstasy, the lubricous excitement, he brought could never be equalled, not even by Prince.
In the life of no other star did sex play so wild a part as we shall see.
In 1955 a young Richard Wayne Penniman was recording in New Orleans.
But Richards producer wasnt hearing anything exciting in the music he was recording.
They went out for a liquid lunch at the local club, which was actually called the Dew-Drop Inn.
It started like this
A-WOP-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-Boom!
The song was filthy and utterly irresistible.
Now this,the producer thought,Ican work with.
His falsetto voice and boundless explosive energy at the keyboard made for hits of unprecedented psychic force.
(Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, at 84.)
But at the time they were all just misfits doing things no one had ever heard before.
Richards sui generis nature was his calling card.
His music aside, Richard was a visual phenomenon as confrontational as his music.
He topped it all off with a towering pompadour.
In this getup, he stood not sat at his keyboard howling his innuendo-filled songs.
It was everything rock-and-roll haters hated.
The first song Paul McCartney ever sang in public was Richards hit Long Tall Sally.
Richard Wayne Penniman was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1932, at the height of the Depression.
Bud married Leva Mae Stewart when she was 14.
She spent the next 14 years having children.
Richard was her third; there were 12 altogether.
One eye was noticeably bigger than the other as well.
This was not welcome in rural Georgia in that era.
Early on, however, he was notorious as a troublemaker.
The narrator is way beyond unreliable.
She would say, Boy, how big are you down there now?
and Id say, I dont know.
And shed look and shed say, Ohhh, youre big enough.
Shed say, Cmon over here.
Shed push me up.
I had done nothin.
She had done it all.
She pushed me up.
She just wanted me.
Richard described worse:
There was a lady we used to have sex with called R.M.S.
A whole lot of black people have had to do that.
It happened to me and my friend, Hester.
I ran off into the woods.
My friend he did it.
It was sickening to me.
Bro Boy really laid me into that he and Hester.
It started with them and it growed.
He once got to meet and sing with Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
He began singing with traveling shows coming through town self-styled spiritualists and the like.
His next few years were spent in ensembles with names like B.
Brown put him on stage in a red dress, calling him Princess Lavonne.
Richards talents were apparent to many early on.
The songs went nowhere and soon he was back in Macon washing dishes.
He started singing and he was so good.
He reminded me of Dinah Washington.
He did a few things, then he got on the floor.
I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that.
I knew I liked him then.
(Peacock also put out Big Mamas Thortons original version of Elvis Presleys later hit, Hound Dog.)
Richard was poised to perhaps become a significant musical force in the area, but his personal life interfered.
(She wasnt very old.
I used to enjoy seeing that.)
In time, Richard was arrested.
He aint gonna be here no more.
So they let me go, and I left Macon.
I couldnt go back and play there no more because of that.
We just stayed on the road.
An awestruck Buddy Holly was in the audience; the pairs lives would cross frequently during Hollys short career.
Its unclear whether that actually happened.)
Richard abandoned his band and headed south.
His name was James Brown.
Amazingly, the group would later use Otis Redding, another Georgia singer, for the same role.)
But the session didnt jell.
If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesnt work out.
Thats when they adjourned to the Dew-Drop Inn and Blackwell got a sense of what Richard was doing onstage.
Virtually all of the breakout hits of the era were variants on earlier songs.
But Richards a cappella opening and the tune itself were apparently original.
Blackwell felt hed found a vehicle that fit the singers image.
He enlisted a young wannabe songwriter, Dorothy LaBostrie, to reshape the words.
They were rudimentary I got a gal / Named Sue / She know just what to do but worked.
That furniture-store session to record Tutti Frutti lasted 15 minutes.
It was the moment the world changed, and the moment a star was born.
It was overly dependent on a honking saxophone or a crashing piano.
But the kids (a) didnt care, and (b) liked what they heard.
In any case, Tutti Frutti has reverberated across the decades.
The rock writerNik Cohntitled his first bookAwopbopaloobopawopbamboom.
His hair was processed a foot high over his head.
Man, he was a freak.
Most people took the words Long Tall Sally as code for what we would call transgender.
(Boone tried, and it didnt go anywhere.)
This song, like Tutti Frutti, ricocheted across a culture at least as far as Liverpool.
He didnt know what to say, which for John was most unusual.
Said John Lennon, much later:
When I heard it, it was so great I couldnt speak.
You know how youre torn?
I didnt want to leave Elvis.
Elvis was bigger than religion in my life.
How could they be happening in my life, both of them?
And then someone said, Its a nigger singing.
I didnt know Negroes sang [rock and roll].
So Elvis was white and Little Richard was black?
Thank you, God, I said.
Richard would have only a few hits that inched into the U.S. pop top ten.
Together, Richard and Blackwell concocted hit after hit: Rip It Up, Ready Teddy, Lucille.
Richard had a blues belters voice, but wasnt really convincing in straight readings.
If anything he cranked up the speed Jenny Jenny is entirely frenetic.
Richards initial rock and roll stardom lasted about 18 months, from 1955 into 1957.
His shows were known for causing riots.
He claimed that his band would sweat through their suits two or three times a performance.
Soon, Richard was driving to shows in a Cadillac with its trunk full of cash.
After the shows were over, he indulged himself.
Sex, he said, was a smorgasbord.
It was a big thrill to me.
If the girls didnt think they could take it, I would watch him make them take it.
As I was watching, I would masturbate while someone was eating my titties.
They should have called me Richard the Watcher.
My whole gay activities were really into masturbation.
I used to do it six or seven times a day.
I got to be a professional jack-offer.
I would do it just to be doing something, seven, eight times a day.
He tracked her down at her home.
(Is he aware that I am a girl?
He was a wild boy for the women.
Angel had the fastest tongue in the West.
Well, she was doing that to me and Buddy took out his thing.
He was ready, so she opened up her legs and he put it in her.
He was trying to rush so he could run onstage.
He made it, too.
He finished and went to the stage still fastening himself up.
Ill never forget that.
He came and he went!
But Richard would never let anybody touch me.
What was going on across the room was a different story.
Richard has a wonderful imagination.
Richard sang two songs, along with Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent.
The business of blues and rock labels was a thoroughly corrupt and complex one.
Never a man a goodboy.
He bought his family a large house in L.A. and moved to the West Coast.
Richard could have been the once and future King of Rock and Roll he always wanted to be.
Instead, in September 1957, he decided to leave rock and roll for good.
Unfortunately, he made the decision in the middle of a tour of Australia.
In the end, all of this went about as well as youd expect.
Richard drove around campus in a yellow Cadillac and disrupted classes.
He tracked Lee Angel down at a gentlemens club in Atlanta and tried to reconnect.
I was only 17 years old …
He was a preacher and I was a stripper and I felt guilty about it.)
When he eventually got married, he showed up six hours late.
But he eventually left.
He reverted to his rock and roll show and immediately started causing sensations again.
How do you describe the most fantastically exciting and shatteringly dynamic stage offering you have ever seen?
wrote theNMEof a Little Richard show on that tour.
But it was all true.
He drove the whole house into a complete frenzy.
In Liverpool and then Hamburg, the Beatles opened for him.
He connected particularly with Paul McCartney, whom he showed how to accomplish his signature squeals.
(you might hear the result in theBeatles version of Long Tall Sally.)
You know, sometimes he would do two in a row and say, Oooh whee!
He did two tonight.
It would bother me.
I didnt want to hear that stuff, yknow.
(Ernestine was right, Richard reflected later.
I was a neglectful husband.
A terrible husband.)
And he hit the road again, playing around the country, including Vegas.
He went on to great fame under his real name, Jimi Hendrix.)
Richard, next to Moreno, broke in:
Letmesay something.
My Lord youre taking over the whole show!
He then launched into a diatribe about how no one could write a book about love.
When Moreno tried to say something, Richard said, Shut up!
Youre talking to a Puerto Rican girl, she warned him.
Youre talking to a Georgia peach!
Angel flew in with some other girls and we had a wonderful time.
I was getting into drugs by this time, smoking marijuana and using a little cocaine.
We used to have orgies all the time.
We just let it all hang out.
All the hookers, hustlers, and dealers hung around there.
All kinds of girls.
Id be the one whod get it started.
Id say, Everybody take off your clothes.
Theyd be so shocked they wouldnt know what to say.
And they wouldnt know what had happened till it was all over.
Similar stories came from his musicians.
The valet had stories as well:
… Diane stayed with us for quite a while.
She called me her student.
We used to have orgies every day.
She used to masturbate in front of everyone and she always wanted to race.
Everybody wanted to race.
Sex in those days was incredible.
I think nowadays its gotten slower!
Did the world want to hear Little Richard wailing, Im a two-time loser?
By the late 1970s, he was also a cocaine freak, supplementing it with angel dust and heroin.
And then came another retraction of his lifes work.
I have rejected homosexuality, he announced.
I have rejected sex.
I have seen the rock groups and the punk-rock people in this country.
And some of their lyrics is demonic.
They talk against God.
His last act was uncharacteristically quiet he hadnt appeared in public in years.
His lawyer said the cause of death was bone cancer.
Richard had spent his later years in Tennessee.
His very survival was something of a miracle and his marathon great-stars life a marvel on another level entirely.
There is a photo of Little Richard, a portrait of ecstasy.
Richard, for his part is … well, he is Little Richard.
And crowning his head is a pompadour thatpompadour, the greatest mountain of hair that rock ever saw.
It may be partly mocking, true, but there is in that look his own moment of ecstasy.
